


The Dead Aren't Scary, It's the Living

by IShouldBeWriting, Rose_To_Fall



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Bechdel Test Pass, Community: rarewomen, Crossover, Episode Tag, Gen, Ritual Magic, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:50:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShouldBeWriting/pseuds/IShouldBeWriting, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rose_To_Fall/pseuds/Rose_To_Fall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexis Castle is studying more than just the usual subjects at Columbia.  The interesting part is what happens when her new <i>recreational vocation</i> runs smack into one of Kate and Castle’s cases.....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gray_Cardinal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Cardinal/gifts).



> Buffy canon for the entire series is fair game. Castle canon through episode 5.17; _“Scared to Death”_ ; blink and you miss it reference to 5.20 _"The Fast and the Furriest”_.  
> 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _My dad is very lucky that I don’t use my hacking skills for evil; just small things like breaking into his computer to swipe the files from his most recent case._

_The wards on his flat were only supposed to be a precaution. He knows not to verbally invite anyone in, and so does grandma, but every so often one of his cases with Kate runs into something that is just a bit *wyrd*. So when my alarms went off ... there was nothing out of place in the flat itself, but there was a leech..._

_Knowing dad he had a copy of Kate’s files for the current case on his computer. And if he had a leech, then it was really a case for Dawn’s employers, not him and Kate._

Sitting back to watch the computer load the files onto her personal drive, Alexis glanced at worriedly at the clock. The last thing she needed was for her grandmother to come home while she was in the middle of this and ask questions.


	2. Chapter 2

‘Error 616: The video you are attempting to access contains magical malware.’

“I wasn’t expecting to see that error.”

“Dawn - “ Sitting in front of the large screen laptop, the girl in question waved a hand, dismissing the attempt to get her to stop what she was doing. Her redheaded companion bit her lip and frowned. “Why don’t you just send it to Andrew? Have him take a look at it. He’s good at this sort of thing and you know he’ll have it turned around and sent back to you just as fast as if you were working on it yourself.”

“No,” she bit out curtly, forestalling any further attempt to get her to relinquish the project. “I can do this. It’s perfectly safe. We just need to strip off the ritual magic components embedded within the overwrite code and -”

Tapping the key with a satisfied flourish, Dawn sat back and watched the script she’d written take off running. Fingers laced her hands behind her head; she tilted back precariously in her chair. Watching from her position behind the other girl, Alexis bit her lip yet again. Training with Dawn, while entirely satisfying from a professional perspective, was going to be the death of what self-control she had. Yes, she was grateful that Dawn had stumbled across her in the anthropology class Alexis had been taking at Columbia. Yes, Alexis’ divergence into studying the occult and subsequent induction into the watcher’s society had given her purpose, focus. But sometimes, just sometimes, the constant electric edge of excitement she felt when she worked with Dawn was more than she could bear. 

The process running on Dawn’s laptop completed with a far too cheerful chirp. Letting herself fall forward again with a thump of chair legs hitting thick carpet, Dawn peered at the script summary.

“The video clip attached to the case file was the source of the leech.” She clicked on another section of the code. “We can’t watch it as an entire clip - it’s still active, still seek victims as a power source for whatever the spell embedded in it is, but we can cut it into sections and watch one at a time. There aren’t any compulsions or bridges layered into it. What did the case file claim this video was responsible for?”

“Everyone who’s watched the video so far has died within 72 hours.”

“Well, the leech you saw on your father isn’t going to kill him,” Dawn offered. “In essence, it’s nothing more than a tracking spell. It’s what’s following the trace that’s the problem.”

“That being?” Alexis prompted, recognizing from her didactic tone that Dawn had gone into teacher-mode yet again. 

“Why we’re going to have to watch sections of the video, because ...” Dawn let the sentence sit open-ended, waiting for her pupil to prove that she could finish the line of reasoning.

“Because the while the video itself is harmless, providing you know how to shield yourself from the leech, it contains the clues as to what’s tracking down and murdering the viewers, doesn’t it?” Alexis proposed.

“And now I know you’ve managed to have time to do the readings I assigned to you as part of your thesis research.”

“Of course I’ve already done the readings!” Alexis’ voice went rose slightly with indignation.

“You had another nine months left to do them in, Alexis. Most of your peers are only just starting to write their thesis - you’ve finished yours, haven’t you?”

“Well, it’s only a very rough draft, but - “

“But nothing, Alexis. This is why I brought you into the society. Yes, there are plenty of your classmates that could potentially have the aptitude for this sort of work, but they don’t have the motivation, the drive, that means they’d do the research _before_ they needed it, even when it’s assigned.”

“You were watching more than just me in that class, weren’t you?” Alexis asked thoughtfully. “Those research materials you assigned were a hidden test.”

“They were. And you just officially passed. We’re in the process of rebuilding the entire organisation after an incident several years back. My mentor moves between the Old English Universities looking for suitable candidates - I was to finish my own PhD here, then I’ll be moving between the American schools as a guest lecturer looking for candidates while supporting the girls based in the US.”

“That’s got to leave you spread awfully thin,” Alexis offered.

Dawn raked long pianist’s fingers through her hair. “You’ve no idea. It doesn’t matter how many weekends I spend traveling, there’s still not enough time for me to cover all the things my mentor was doing before he left. Fortunately, with the number of girls there now are, might does equal right more often than not. The girls always work in at least pairs, so we don’t lose very many of them anymore, but strength doesn’t help with puzzles like this one.”

“Speaking of which," the redhead gestured back to the computer on the desk, “how do we go about what’s next? I know you’ve stripped off and contained the leech, but what do we do now?”

“Now,” Dawn said with a wistful smile, “we engage in some good old-fashioned Scooby-style detective work.”

Grinning, Alexis pulled up a chair of her own.

“I’ve stripped the sound track off for the moment, -”

“Because most entrapment spells work through more than one sense, and with a mundane video, you’re already down to two, right?” Dawn looked at her a little oddly.

“Dad knows a Vodoun high priestess. I went and asked her for a proper primer last year.”

Dawn shook her head. “In which case it’s a really good thing you threw yourself in front of me, because with that sort of information at your hands, you could have landed yourself in a real mess.”

“I know that now,” Alexis agreed, shuddering at what she now knew had been her potential for getting in over her head when she’d first become curious about magics, “but that was before I knew you, and Kate and Dad had just wound up with their third supernatural case, and she was the one contact he had that I knew definitely had Magic and I needed to do _something_.”

Taking one hand off the keyboard, Dawn squeezed her pupil’s arm with a reassuringly cocky smile. “It’s okay. You may have dodged a proverbial bullet but the point is that you _did_ dodge it. Close counts when it comes to horseshoes, hand grenades, tactical nukes, and avoiding occult catastrophes.”

“One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me exactly how you know that’s true...” Alexis said, fishing yet again for more information into the dark past that she could taste sometimes in the power that ran underneath her mentor’s skin. The other girl might not be ready to tell her about it just yet, but Alexis’ curiosity refused to let go. _I am my father’s daughter, I suppose..._

Dawn cued up the video. “That’s not a living human eye we’re looking through at that graveyard. Three gravestones. Does anything catch your eye, Alexis?”

“The eye actually reminds me a bit of something from this old speculative fiction show that my dad and I used to watch when I was a kid. _The Outer Limits_ , I think it was? Anyways, the most prominent thing in the image is the Celtic cross style gravestone. But the field of vision it’s seen through, it’s all washed out in blue. Could that be a quality of how whatever it is sees? In ultraviolet?”

“That’s one possibility. The implication being?”

“- that the watcher from whose eyes we’re viewing the graveyard isn’t human,” Alexis stated with firm certainty.

“Exactly. Which means we know that the actual killer, or at the very least the impulse to kill, isn’t necessarily being driven by human motives.”

“Greeeeaaaaattt,” Alexis drawled. “So now I have to learn how to think like a demon?”

“Not precisely,” Dawn said, flicking backwards and forwards through the next half dozen images in the clip. “While the killer may not be human, the motives behind the killing probably are. Most of them are connected with magic, ritual, but that’s a point where human and other meet and share a frame of reference. But look at these two images,” she’d picked two of them out and tossed them up separately into a side window. “These two don’t fit. There’s nothing magical or occult about them at all. Why the red herring?”

“There could have been, if they’d chosen a different time on the clock tower, or the ghost was clearer,” Dawn passed several tools from one of Andrew’s programs over the blur on the picture.

“That’s not a ghost. That’s a digital artefact, made solely of tiny 13s? And both it and the clock tower were inserted into the video after it was originally made. In fact they weaken the leech - at least a bit.”

“So we set that aside for the moment,” she said decisively.

“If you give me a copy of those two images I can ask my dad about them, try to see if they’ve got some other relevance to the case.”

“So we’ve got blood swirling down the drain, a graveyard, a burning saint, a phoenix, the Tibetan wheel, an Ankh, one of the Masonic symbols, a demon’s eye, three ceremonial magic glyphs, melting red wax, a burning tree, a stone gargoyle, and a light swinging in a hypnotic fashion ...” Dawn tapped her teeth. “Forget about the fact this is a video for a moment.”

“Okay...” Alexis drew out slowly, waiting to see where the other girl was going with her thoughts.

Dawn grabbed a thick leather bound notebook from her briefcase and flipped it open to a page currently covered in notes and small sketches.

“When I’m constructing a spell, I work best on paper. But not everyone works that way. Willow’s faster on a computer than she is writing. And she works from so many different vectors of sensory components and varying traditions of spell-craft that for her, the best way to keep notes is in a multimedia brainstorming cloud on her computer.”

“So you think we might be looking at someone’s spell notes?”

“Precisely.”

“So if this video is someone’s working notes for a spell, all we have to do is figure out what the spell was supposed to be and we’ll be able to determine who and what the real killer is, right?”

“Yes. The problem is most people keep all of their working notes in one place under lock and key. They don’t tend to divide them up and ship them off to people in DVD format unless those others are members of their coven. So why this spell? We can assume given the murders your father’s investigating that the spell worked. But what happened to the person who created it? And what on earth would possess someone to mail off a copy of something capable of killing?”

“Unless they didn’t know it would when they sent off the copies?”

“Whatever the spell was aimed at is among the dead. And they wanted to call it to life.” Alexis grabbed the mouse and flicked forward through the video, stopping it on an image of a particularly gruesome and toothy gargoyle. “Look at this image. It’s a church gargoyle. The ones used both to ward off evils and rain down vengeance on the unbelievers. Someone wanted vengeance, justice.”

“And your father and his partner are accidental targets, which means whomever originally created this spell didn’t put any limiters on it. The leech is a marker for whatever they’ve summoned, to allow it to find the intended victim - they bleed enough energy to make them visible to it even behind wards as a result.”


	3. Chapter 3

“I left a keyword aggregator running in the background on Dad’s computer -” Dawn raised an eyebrow at her in amusement, “apparently one of his fans identified the picture with the ‘ghost’ in. The background is a place called the Brunswick Inn. Both of the murder victims in he and Kate’s case stayed there during a court trial while they were testifying.”

“Oh well _that’s_ certainly going to be a motive for seeking vengeance, isn’t it? If the person they were testifying against believed they were being wrongfully accused...”

“The man on trial in that case? He died in prison.”

“Then who else would want to take revenge on his accusers?”

Alexis snapped her own computer open on the desk beside Dawn’s and began furiously searching through the pilfered case files. 

“He had a brother,” she began but then shook her head. “No, he ended up in an asylum. It can’t be him.”

“Never discount the potential damage madness can cause,” Dawn warned, peering at the case files as well, “but no, in this case I think we can rule him out. Resurrection spells require too many ingredients, and I know that asylum - they know better than to let at least two of them in.”

“Somehow I’ve got a feeling that I don’t want to know _what_ you know about that asylum.”

“No, you don’t,” Dawn agreed, “though if you keep going down this path of study, someday you are going to end up knowing whether you like it or not.” Seeing Alexis’ eyes go wide as saucers, she shook her head. “But as I said, we can set that aside for the moment. We’re likely looking for a female caster anyway, given some of the choice of imagery - young and still fairly raw at spell-work - not much older than either of us, or she’d be on someone’s watch list and this wouldn’t have happened.”

Alexis grimaced. There could be so many more situations just like this one which were being averted every day by Willow, Andrew, Dawn, and others who lived on the borderlands between the mundane world and other. Looking backwards from her present perspective, all Alexis could remember were some of the other _odd_ cases her father and Kate had handled. Had someone like Dawn been watching from the shadows? Carefully disarming the occult components of those cases of their lethal potential so Kate and her dad could do their jobs? What had she gotten herself into? Was this really the world she wanted to be living in? But she couldn’t un-make that decision, could she? Pandora’s Box was never meant to be closed. And _someone_ had to do this.

“So young, female, connected to the case, with a reason to want at least two of the witnesses dead. If she’s not connected to the actual killer, then what about one of the victims?” Dawn’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

“Oh,” she sat back and blinked. “We’ve got a problem. With the original crime, when the first girl was taken, Val and Jason both saw it happen - but they misidentified the man involved. Another girl was taken while he was in police custody, but he died before he could be released. He was a retired watcher - and he had a daughter in the right age range.”

“If it has crossed into the supernatural world, is this actually still a mundane case?”

“No - well, maybe. The more recent round of killings is still something that has moved outside the realm of the mundane, but it did leave bodies and evidence behind, so your father may still get to solve a mundane case as well.”

“Would the dead watcher’s daughter have known enough to have created this spell? What on earth could have possessed her -” Alexis mused.

Dawn sat bolt upright, slamming the legs of her chair on the floor with a thud.

“Possession! That’s it! Whatever it is that she pulled in when creating this spell possessed her, used her knowledge of the mundane world, sent out the DVDs, which it then used to track down the victims and with an active leech ...”

“It can bypass almost any set of wards that it’s target might hide behind. So trying to provide safety to its victims is moot. What we need, is a way to break it’s capacity for tracking the victims. And then we need a way of taking it out of the game so the police can do the rest. All while keeping my dad and Kate in the dark.” Alexis rubbed her temples. “I think I’m getting a headache.”

“Well, you could tell them,” Alexis opened her mouth to protest, but Dawn continued, allaying her fears, “but that doesn’t always end well. Especially when one of the individuals is a police officer. We’ve had to fish more than one of the girls out of asylums - at this point it’s become almost a badge of honor thanks to Buffy.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about that. Eventually. But right now - “

“- right now, we need a plan.” Dawn finished in agreement. “One option would be to reconstruct the spell, and summon whatever it is ourselves, but actually have a trap set up for it - but to be honest, I’d rather save that as a Hail Mary to keep your father alive. Too much of a risk of one of us ending up possessed instead. And Giles would be somewhat unhappy with me if I joined Xander in the ranks of the possessed.”

Alexis smirked understanding and sympathy but then her eyes narrowed, flicking rapidly back and forth between Dawn, and the two computers in front of them. “We don’t need to reconstruct the spell at all. I think that it’s right here under our noses. Or at least, the keys to figuring out what spell was used have been!”

“Um, okay, you’ve lost me. Care to explain?” If there was one thing Dawn had learned since becoming a watcher, it was never to discount the brilliance of inspiration when it came to throwing your target off guard.

Sitting forward to her computer, Alexis collapsed the windows she had open, pulling up a blank document instead. “Run that video again. Only this time, slowly. We need to see what the images actually are and what order they’re in.”

Obligingly, Dawn played back the video clip, running it through slowly as Alexis tapped away, taking notes.

“There,” Alexis said, sitting back again. “Now can you see it?”

Dawn scrutinized the list on the screen. “Death, Martyrdom, Resurrection, Offering, Cycle. Secrecy, Supremacy, Seance, Power, the Occult. Target. Ceremony, Time, Judgement, Vengeance, Altered State. I wonder if she scrambled the order of the images to stop the video actually casting the spell for her, or if the error in the sequence is what’s caused her to lose control of what she’s summoned.”

“Then, you think I’m right about this? And does it really matter given what’s happened already?”

“Mmmm. If she’d got the sequence when she performed the ritual correct, then she should have got what she wanted - a chance for her father to take his vengeance, if he wanted it. But if her father’s death was the opening part, then that puts things out of sequence. Which would mean that she’s summoned something else because she made the offering after he died. If she was concentrating on the victims your father knows about, then whatever this is has probably been the serial killer all along, depending on when she started this.”

“So how do we stop it?” Alexis asked, the sense of focus and purpose that made her so good as a trainee bringing them back once again to the purpose of their task.

Dawn gave a determined smile. “Oh, I’ve got a couple ideas...”


	4. Chapter 4

“Why’d you have a bottle of Holy Water with you, Castle?”

“Alexis handed it to me this morning. Said she thought I might need it the way I’d been acting.”

Kate cocked her head at him. “Really, Castle?”

“What?!?!” He asked, with a defensive shrug of the shoulders. “It worked, didn’t it? And she certainly collapsed when I hit her with it ...”

“You hit her over the head, Castle.”

“Not hard enough to knock her out, Kate.”

“Then I guess we can chalk this one up to your sterling aim.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Time Stamp: Post Episode 5.20 - "The Fast and the Furriest"_

“Dad, I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Dawn.”

Richard smiled pleasantly at the young woman sitting on his sofa. 

“Dawn’s been the teaching assistant for one of the courses I’ve been taking this semester. Turns out, she’s got an interest of her own in the subject I’m using for my thesis.”

“Oh, so you’re studying mythology and folklore too?” Richard asked.

“Something like, “ Dawn said cryptically, looking pointedly at his daughter as if to encourage her to say something more.

“Yeah, um, About that, Dad....The case you just finished? We need to talk about that....”


End file.
